Australia have recently implemented a system,to monitor internet use,Ban websites and etc,and I believe that the U.K. has something similar?I don't live in these countries but if I was I would feel quite invaded.I want to hear from people who live in these countries.What are your opinions?
As far as I know we don’t have a system in the UK that filters what websites we can access, I’m sure the government would like one but I would hope such a system would never get approved, people would be outraged I’m sure. A lot of ISP’s do traffic shape over here now and slow your connection down if you download so much in a certain time frame but that’s the only restriction the majority of ISP’s place on people over here.
a favorite for conspiracy theorists in the U.S. has always been the FBI's supposed "Predator" program, which monitors all email, internet traffic, and any kind of digital transmission. supposedly it looks for keywords, like if i searched for "al quada application", or "how to build a nuclear bomb in my garage", or anything that has to do with hurting/killing some government official. there are even some that say this system pushes further into phone conversations and library books check out, but i think its all bullshit. i dont think any government would want to spend the time and money it would take to monitor all digital traffic for an entire country. if you live in australia, and this does in fact go in to place, i would suggest you get everyone you know to search and view controversial material at every second of free time they had, just to overload the system. send out messages to everyone you can to do the same. show them how worthless this program would be. if i'm wrong, then this post has sent a red flag to the FBI, so watch out! =D a side note: a few years ago, a kid in Minnesota (he was 16 or 17), for his Eagle Scout project, actually built a fully functional nuclear bomb in his garage. they made a big show of arresting him and confiscating it, but if they have any kind of sense, hopefully they sent him to the best schools there are and he now works for NASA or something.
It could quite possibly exist. I know for a fact that the UK monitors internet and telephone usage via the signals intelligence agency GCHQ. I would speculate that while saying something like "mortar attack on 10 downing street at 10:00 17/02/2009" would be picked up by the system, there is so much data passing through the system and so many items flagged up that it would never appear above the radar unless it matched criteria they were actively searching for.
I've seen many movies where they have this "INTELLIGANCE AGENCY" that appearantley monitors calls and mails and so on, (like icharus mentioned) but yet to me it still seems like a myth, because obviously if the "Terrorists" know about this they a going to disguise certain words like Bombs or anything to do with Warfare, and in most cases they speak other completely different languages, mixing 15 different ethnic languages together and what do you get a whole lot of confused F.B.I agents.... Oh Well, i suppose they can try and bann majority of website (that we find to be the best websites) but there will always be a way around it....
The USA does have these intelligence agencies, the National Security Agency (NSA) springs to mind. I imagine it’s quite easy for them to monitor stuff considering a lot of traffic that passes over the internet is not encrypted so anyone who knows how could see it. Telephone calls are easy to tap in to too. The biggest spy base the NSA has is actually in North Yorkshire, England... a bit too close to home if you ask me Read more about it here
The only country where I've heard of anything like this would be China, where most forms of communication are controlled by the government. To even own a blog you need to register your full identity with the government (second paragraph). I don't understand why such restrictions would be needed for anything at all, but apparently they can't even trust there own citizens to use Google (in "The Great Firewall of China" subheading).